After near-breakup, Chimaira is off to a brand new beginning

March 13, 2007|By Steve Knopper, Tribune Newspapers: Newsday

Mark Hunter seems like a pretty amiable guy over the phone. He likes to talk about his old restaurant jobs and '80s martial-arts movies, and he uses only a tiny bit of sarcasm when he declares everything is "good as gravy." So it's hard to square his personality with the guttural, shrieking voice on Chimaira's latest album and its obsession with black hearts, dead souls, screaming little girls and lyrics such as "brown yellow and white diseases/plague the streets with a vile stench." What does Hunter, who formed the Cleveland death-metal band in 1998, do when everything's too good-gravy for him to be depressed?

"I approach every song the same way," says Hunter, whose band is part of the No Fear Tour with Killswitch Engage. (The tour will be at the House of Blues in Chicago on April 7 and 8.) "I will close my eyes and listen to the instrumental of the song -- whatever the first emotion is, that comes out. If I picture something gross and disgusting, I'm going to write about it. If I picture something positive, I'm going to write about it. If I picture Jean-Claude Van Damme spin-kicking in [1989's martial-arts classic] `Cyborg,' then I'm going to write about it."

Hunter's "Cyborg" fantasies were almost wasted on Chimaira this time around. The band's new album, "Resurrection," its fourth, almost didn't even happen. Hunter believed its longtime record label, Roadrunner, wasn't giving it a proper promotional push. Members of the band threatened to quit. Things were bad. Hunter was prepared to go it alone.

"I would have started a new band. For sure," he says over the cell phone static aboard his tour bus in Niagara Falls. "I had already recruited Andols, our drummer. I was ready. But it would have really sucked. We'd almost been doing this for 10 years."

Instead, the raw-meat "Resurrection," which starts off loud and punishing and just gets louder and more punishing, brought the band closer together. Whereas lead guitarist Rob Arnold wrote most of the music on 2005's "Chimaira," the rest of the band brought more ideas into the studio this time around. And Chimaira -- pronounced kim-EAR-uh in a loose homage to the Greeks' mythical monstrosity with the lion head -- signed with the small label Ferret Records after breaking with Roadrunner. "We also took some time off, which is a rarity for us," Hunter says. "We were able to write the album in a good head space."

So nobody had to break up the band. Which was good news for Hunter, who is pleased that his restaurant career is more than seven years in the rearview mirror.

"I started off at a pizza place, making pizzas . . . and then started going on to real restaurants and cooking," he recalls. "I found that I liked the lazy side of being able to deliver food and sit in my car and listen to music all the time. I wanted to do music rather than be a manager for somebody else. I figured I'd take the least responsibility possible."